Effective Hamiltonian Definitions of Work and Heat in Open Quantum Systems
In quantum thermodynamics the split of an open system's internal energy into work and heat has long been ambiguous. This concept resolves it by recognizing that a Hamiltonian plays two roles - fixing the internal energy as its expectation value and generating the dynamics - and decomposing it into a part that commutes with the density operator (which fixes the internal energy) and an orthogonal part that drives the evolution; applying the same decomposition to the system-environment interaction yields an effective Hamiltonian giving consistent, dynamics-dependent definitions of internal energy, work, and heat.
Thermodynamic Work and Heat for a Quantum Process: Approach by Hamiltonian Decomposition Tao Zhou
This quantum-thermodynamics paper resolves the long-standing ambiguity in defining work and heat for an open quantum system. Its central device is that a Hamiltonian plays two distinct roles for a qu…